


Personal Best

by ChipAndDealer



Series: Skipping Hogwarts [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Let's all go to therapy, One Shot, Time Travel, Time Travelling Harry Potter, We're back by popular demand, We're doing a sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:28:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27759922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChipAndDealer/pseuds/ChipAndDealer
Summary: Half an hour past her appointment time, Hermione arrived at the office with a man. "Margaret, this is... Harry Potter."The therapist turned her eyes to his thin frame and disheveled appearance. For a moment, with the weariness in his features and expensive seeming suit, she had him figured for a politician of some kind, but there was a tilt to his bearing that belied the assumption. This was a soldier. "It's nice to meet you, Mister Potter, my name is Margaret Chung. Please, both of you, have a seat."
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter
Series: Skipping Hogwarts [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2030644
Comments: 8
Kudos: 97





	Personal Best

The clock in Margaret Chung's therapist office didn't tick. This was by design. During her eight hour workday, seeing a variety of clients with a selection of diverse neurosis the last thing she needed was a monotonous pounding beat to add flavor to the latest recollection of childhood trauma.

This wasn't to say she didn't like her job, on the contrary, watching people slowly improve over time, becoming happier and healthier people filled her with warmth at the thought that what she was doing added just a bit more good to the world. Even as England seemed to grow darker and colder by the day, in ways that the natural progression of Winter couldn't account for, she took solace in that thought.

On that particular day, however, the roiling fog becoming ever more common in the mornings had parted somewhat and the bright warmth of a new day shone down on her face in such a way it seemed almost a shame to go inside.

Still, being late into the office wouldn't do her any good. Moving up some of her appointments wouldn't be a major issue, but there was one client in the middle of the day that was particularly rigid about her start and end times, so changing any aspect of that was fraught with issues.

Margaret felt a headache beginning to form at the back of her head, mulling how much she could afford to ignore it as she walked inside.

Greeting Millie, the receptionist, taking a cup of coffee from the pot she'd already made, Margaret walked into her office and laid back in her chair for a nice few minutes of just her and her coffee. A few sips in, she decided to take one of the ibuprofens she had stashed in her desk before the headache could get completely out of hand.

The day, it seemed, would be long.

As clients met her for each appointment in turn and her day moved forward, Margaret couldn't shake a strange off-feeling, that only worsened as time wore on. By the time her latest client had walked out the door, her distraction was such it took a few minutes before she looked up at the clock again, noting the time as it silently ticked by.

Her eyebrows furrowed as she checked the time again. Then she took her phone out to see if the clock was fast, but the times matched up perfectly. After a few moments, she stood up from her desk and walked into the reception area, looking around at the nearly empty room.

"Millie, has Miss Granger called about her appointment?" Margaret asked. "It's a minute past, and normally she'd be breaking down my door by now."

Millie checked the phone, then her computer before shaking her head. "No, it looks like she hasn't checked in."

There were many things Hermione Granger was: an avid reader, snarky conversationalist, logical thinker, and bundle of assorted social anxiety and obsessive compulsive tendencies, but one thing she wasn't was late. Except, somehow, that day she was.

Margaret couldn't prove it, but it felt like that off-feeling she'd had all day was somehow like a warning that something was very wrong, and Hermione's missing the appointment was some cosmic confirmation that was true.

So she sat in her office, and she toyed with the coffee cup that had long been empty, and she waited for news on the end of the world.

Half an hour past her appointment time, Hermione arrived at the office with a man. "Margaret, this is... Harry Potter." 

Margaret turned her eyes to the man, his thin frame and disheveled appearance. For a moment, with the weariness in his features and expensive seeming suit, she had him figured for a politician of some kind, but there was a tilt to his bearing that belied the assumption. This was a soldier. "It's nice to meet you, Mister Potter, my name is Margaret Chung. Please, both of you, have a seat."

Hermione chose her usual chair, while Harry sat awkwardly on the chaise lounge, seeming a bit unsure where exactly he was supposed to be putting his hands.

"So, Hermione," she broached gently. "You've been seeing me for a number of years now and I don't remember you mentioning Mister Potter over there. Have you known each other for a long time, or is this a more recent meeting?"

Hermione glanced to the side, and the ever-nervous Mister Potter. "Accounts vary," she answered, cryptically. "May I present you with a hypothetical?" 

Margaret blinked at the abrupt change in subject, but nodded.

"Let's say for a moment, that Harry Potter and I were madly in love with one another." Margaret raised an eyebrow, but Hermione continued. "We're deeply in love, doing all the..." she hesitated, "couple things, when a war breaks out. Harry goes off to war, he goes off to fight in the war, and he leaves me behind and I get amnesia. So when he finally comes back, I don't remember him, but he remembers me so now he wants to," she reaches for the word for a moment, "recreate the circumstances of us meeting and falling in love, but that would also mean starting another war." She put her index fingers to her temples to massage them while she looked straight at Margaret. "I guess what I'm trying to ask here is, what should I do?"

There were a few false starts, as Margaret opened her mouth to say something, some response or comment trapped behind her teeth, but eventually she leaned over her desk and pressed a button, speaking into a microphone above it. "Millie, can you bring in another cup of coffee, please?" With an assent from Millie, she finally felt braced enough to give some kind of answer. "Well, I suppose to start, how do you feel about Harry now? If he's unkind to you, or you think the relationship may have been an unhealthy one, then trying to repair it in some way isn't in either of your best interests."

"He's... nice," she finally decided, before adding. "In this hypothetical situation."

Margaret thanked the stars Millie chose that moment to walk in with the coffee, so she had a few more moments to consider her answer. "The advice that I would give," she began, "would be that love isn't encapsulated in a moment that you can artifically recreate, and attempting to do so and hurting others in the process doesn't sound like a healthy solution."

As a single, forty-five year old who was also not a couples counselor, Margaret didn't consider herself an expert on love of any kind, but advising people, even in this dubiously hypothetical space, not to start wars was probably a safe bet.

"What if it would bring her memories back?" Harry asked, suddenly. "What if it let her become a hero, get a better job, be a happier person?"

"And how many lives would that be at the expense of?" Margaret asked back. "Wanting to help Hermione is noble, but no matter the context, do you really think starting a war is the only way she can be happy?" Looking at Harry's worn face and collapsed expression, she couldn't help but add. "That you can?"

"I'm happy," he denied, quietly.

Margaret sighed, masking the action with a sip of her latest cup of coffee. "Let me put it to you this way: Harry, you love Hermione, correct?" The assenting nod he gave was without hesitation. "And Hermione, you believe, on some level, that Harry is telling the truth when it comes to your relationship that you don't remember?" If there wasn't an explanation for the ridiculous hypothetical forthcoming, Margaret was sure she'd lose her mind, but the job came first.

"Well, of course I believe him," Hermione responded, frustrated. "I don't know why. Half of what he said didn't make any sense in the slightest, but if I didn't believe him, I wouldn't have brought him here, and I did, so... I guess I do."

Margaret clapped her hands together. "Then what is stopping you from starting over in a more organic way? If both of you believe in the relationship of before, why not believe in it right now? Get out of the past and pursue a future where you both could be happy." At Harry's skeptical expression, she turned to him fully. "Think back to your relationship with Hermione. Do you think she was happy because of a different job, because she was some kind of hero, or could it have been being there with you, that made her happy?"

Harry's eyes widened, some memory of tears flitting to the surface as he grasped his hands at nothing. "But I wouldn't know what to do, this, I've never done any of this before."

"Sure you have," Margaret encouraged. "Meeting Hermione, falling in love with her, you've done it once before. Even if the circumstances change, won't the feelings remain the same? Otherwise, what kind of love could it be?"

Hermione looked to Harry, as Harry looked right back. "I suppose, in the interest of this hypothetical, an experiment is in order."

Harry grinned, looking for a small moment in that therapist's office with the silent clock, like the soldier come home he was supposed to be, about to be wrapped in the arms of his amnesiac lady.

Margaret chuckled, inwardly at the image that thought brought with it. She was fairly certain that if Hermione had ever suffered from amnesia, she would have heard of it, after all, to a therapist it was the sort of thing that might come up. At the same time, however, the very specific strangeness of the story gave her pause, particularly with how it resonated with the purposefully vague and often confusing recountings of her time at school, a school which she had, even after seeing Margaret in a professional capacity for a number of years, refused to name.

So how much was true? Was Harry Potter really Hermione Granger's former lover wrenched away by the cruel grip of war, only to return for her to see his face as that of a stranger, or was there some other circumstance at work, perhaps one far more mundane, and it was only Hermione's flair for fiction that framed the hypothetical that way?

The clock ticked over the hour.

At the end of the day, she supposed, true accuracy in the situation mattered very little. For a reporter, for an investigator, the truth must be secured at all costs, but for a therapist, events and details must eventually give way to feelings and resolutions; the idea that, you can't change the past, but mould the future into a better one.

As Harry and Hermione left the office, stiff and awkward as antique brooms but smiling at each other all the same, Margaret wondered what a future they might make.

She hoped it'd be a good one.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short little idea I had I decided to post so I wasn't a LIAR when I told people in the last one there'd probably be a sequel.
> 
> The next one will have magic. You know, probably.
> 
> And maybe Sirius Black, he's probably wondering where Harry is by now.


End file.
